Another day, another infiltration. According to Olafimihan Oshin’s report for The Hill (August 15, 2023):
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said Tuesday that he was the victim of a hacking attack by Chinese spies after hackers reportedly also managed to read emails belonging to State Department employees….
[On Twitter Bacon said] that the hackers “utilized a vulnerability in the Microsoft software” and that the breach was not caused by “user error.”
Bacon thinks that he was probably targeted because of his support for Taiwan and opposition to China’s mass surveillance, roundups, torture, rape, forced labor, and murders of the Uyghurs in China. The Uyghurs and other Muslims are among the groups that the Chinese government systematically assaults in the name of promoting cultural assimilation and combatting terrorism.
In addition to the State Department, other recent U.S. targets of Chinese email-hacking include the U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and other officials of the Department of Commerce. In a July 2023 post, Microsoft said that starting in May, “a China-based threat actor [Storm-0558] with espionage objectives . . . used forged authentication tokens to access email from approximately 25 organizations” and that Microsoft had “successfully blocked this campaign from Storm-0558.”
